The shamanism forum is one of many grouped together under the heading Faith Communities. I must confess to being troubled by the apparently politically correct expression faith community, which seems to me to have a built-in bias toward a Christian way of looking at spiritual traditions. Belief is very important among Christians; it is the kind of thing Christians have fought wars over. Comparative religion texts often show the same bias: they will have individual chapters on the Big Religions, each with a section headed something like What They Believe. Indeed, look at the name of Beliefnet itself.

Shamanism, I think, is not faith-oriented in the same way. When shamans gather, they do not argue over the ontological status of the deer spirit; they talk about shamanic practice -- what skins make the best drum heads, what experiences they have had, what plant mixtures have the best effect. And gossip, of course -- who has worked love magic on whom, who is secretly a sorcerer, what patients have been difficult and ungrateful. Shamans seem to speak rarely about metaphysics.

Thus shamans, unlike some other traditions, are not a faith community; rather, they are a community of practice. Shamanist cultures have certainly fought each other -- over land, over women, over accusations of sorcery, over power and status. But not, as far as I know, about beliefs.